This is Ryan Reynolds' second company he has sold which he has a "significant stake" in after he sold his Aviator Gin to the big whale, Diageo brands. He's been able to leverage his status and marketing talent to grow those brands significantly. Other actors, athletes also do this, but perhaps he is the most noticeable. George Clooney also sold an alcohol brand to Diageo.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-15/t-mobile-....
Ryan Reynolds youtube channel is an exemple in how bad 99% of advertising campaigns are. Almost everything he posts are ads for his companies or ventures, and not only am I subscribed but I eagerly watch every content he post as soon as I get the notification.
A part of it is that it's funny and well made, the other parts is that the content doesn't have that "bullshit ad" factor, I don't know how to explain it, he knows it's an ad, you know it's an ad, nobody is hiding from it.
And you will find that 90% of comments under his video are saying the same thing I am here, the guy has essentially made watching ads fun.
(also, some of his Gin ads are hilarious, like his "Ryan Reynolds' Vasectomy" cocktail recipe)
I'm not sure you can blame advertising campaigns. Ryan Reynolds' 'thing' is being self-aware that he's Ryan Reynolds doing something. It's basically the M.O. of Deadpool.
He makes it look easy, but I'm sure it's hard to replicate.
90% of YouTube comments are hive mind borderline bot generated "direct quote from video" foam finger NPC I'm with stupid verbal diarrhea. His videos/ads tee up such comments which are social proof to further draw in more viewers that generate more such comments.. and now "ads are fun to watch when Ryan does them".
He gets a pass, fine, sure, but goddamn.. I watched (and yes, enjoyed as a guilty pleasure) a few of those and YouTube recommended me this crime against humanity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap3JGsCAu9A
I never thought I'd say this but there is such a thing as too Canadian. Enough already. Go kick a cat or something to balance it out.
At the same time, I recognize there is a lot to be learned from that guy. God I hate marketing. And humans. I mean love. Everything will be fine, just remain positive.
Edit: Not to self, stay in your lane Kowalski. Stay. In. Your. Lane.
hive mind borderline bot generated "direct quote from video" foam finger NPC I'm with stupid verbal diarrhea
Using commas between adjectives would help with readability to optimize your content engagement. As it stands, it can be difficult to distinguish between adjectival phrases that use nouns like "foam finger." Since diarrhea can be foamy with integrated gaseous contents and I guess can be initiated with a finger (maybe?), it is unclear if the phrase should be "foam, finger, verbal diarrhea" or "foam finger, verbal diarrhea."
It is a fine thing to hold one’s HN comments in such regard. I’m not so ant-footed to impose anything but submit an offering for your consideration should you wish to geld such a lilly.
Maybe I just have a soft spot since he's Canadian, but I think in this case Mint's provided some real genuine net benefit for consumers and I think using Reynolds positioning helped them get there.
Complete speculation, but I'd hazard a guess that they were able to offer such cheap service during the era of near zero interest rates coupled with their masterful use of celebrity to market their service made them an user acquisition machine and that T-Mobile is now paying a mint (no pun intended) to acquire all those users.
OP said consumers not themselves specifically. OP could very well be Canadian and see that a fellow Canadian has provided a valuable service for American consumers even if they themselves aren't able to take advantage of that service.
Exactly! I'm a Canadian living in New York. Reynolds & Gosling are two Ryans we hold pretty dear to our hearts, though they're both are so world famous folks often guess them to be American.
The alcohol stuff always amazes me. Making a gin isn't rocket science. Aviation Gin was basically a no-name brand. The fact that attaching a celebrity name brings so much value is mind-boggling to me.
They did talk about selling it. From their doc, they knew nothing about soccer before buying it. Just the idea of promotion/relegation meant like as a business opportunity they buy a team for 2m in the 5th division in England, if they make it to the Prem, it'll be worth 100-150m, and in 5-10 years maybe more, if Prem League appreciates in advertising value, etc. Will be interesting, they will likely move up to the next division this year or next. Still moving up the next 3 divisions will be the toughest.
I've been a Mint customer for about 4 years, paying the annual upfront payment, which works out to $15/mo. And shaking my head at those who are paying double or triple that rate on T-Mobile, even though Mint uses the same exact network.
In terms of why T-Mobile is making this purchase, I'm pretty sure it's to take out someone who was eating their lunch.
I've always found it strange that an MVNO is able to operate on the T-Mobile network the entire time and undercut their rates so much that they become a threat.
I guess T-Mobile thinks there are two ways to resolve this: lower their rates to compete with the MVNO, or buy the MVNO ... which I'm sure will result in rate increases, even though they say they have no immediate plans to do that.
It's the same network, but you get the capacity that's left over after everyone on T-Mobile has had their fill. Which is why I don't get why everyone is always so excited about these MVNOs. To me, it's like bragging about how cheap airfare is when you go standby: "It's the exact same planes!".
I understand this argument, but in practice it has never been a factor in my daily usage of the service. I think the bandwidth improvements by providers over the years have made this a mostly academic concern.
I live in a major metro area that should theoretically be impacted by sheer volume of use, and I’ve also spent significant time on the road traveling (recent 7K mile overlanding trip through 15 states is one example), and never once experienced a slowdown.
Wireless networks are pretty fast these days, and if I’ve ever been throttled, I just haven’t noticed.
YMMV, and maybe I don’t have use cases that are impacted by this, but after experiencing what I’ve experienced, I have no questions at all about my decision to move away from the big networks.
I’ve used Mint and Xfinity Mobile (Verizon MVNO).
> To me, it's like bragging about how cheap airfare is when you go standby: "It's the exact same planes!"
The experience and cost of using cheap airfare/standby is pretty well documented and rather dissimilar conceptually to what’s going on with MVNOs. The cheap ticket experience isn’t just “same planes”, it brings with it a very real likelihood of failure and customers generally go in knowing this up front.
If MVNOs were unusable as often as standby flights are unavailable, the business model would quickly cease to exist.
I find the notion of bragging about any of this for any reason rather odd, but it’s hard to ignore the significant savings over time.
> I live in a major metro area that should theoretically be impacted by sheer volume of use,
Nah, those towers tend to be built & upgraded to have the capacity. Where you mostly notice the MVNO suckage is if you take the biggest road out of town, drive two hours, make a left turn, and then drive an hour away from everything. But then again, wide coverage has historically not been T-mo's strength anyway (they've improved a lot in last few years).
> Where you mostly notice the MVNO suckage is if you take the biggest road out of town, drive two hours, make a left turn, and then drive an hour away from everything.
I covered this in the 2nd half of the quoted sentence. I spent over a month in places like that throughout the US, and didn’t have issues.
I’m not saying issues don’t exist, but I never ran into the described suckage.
Finding a spot out there with poor signal isn’t hard, but that’s a separate issue.
It's not hard to understand: many people simply don't need a high-speed unlimited data plan for their phones. Not everyone makes a habit of streaming video over their cellular connection.
Are we sure that no matter how de-prioritized you are, some data is always available, with reasonable latency? I was just at a large sports stadium last night, and I was able to message my wife to tell her I was on my way home while looking up the best bus to take. I remember that not being possible a few years ago, but I don't know if that's because networks in general have gotten better, or because I'm now paying quite a lot of money for Verizon post-paid.
EDIT: Oh, and I totally forgot about tethering. That can be severely restricted on MVNOs. And, at least for me, I don't need it. Until I need it. Then I NEED it. haha
Tethering is less restricted on MVNO's because often they can't do anything to stop you anyway. I've been tethering on prepaid plans for over ten years now without issues, and without paying anything extra for it.
I've used Mint at large venues. It really depends on the venue what your experience will be like. Usually I'll get at least a few megabits of speed at the venues near me, some places I've gotten practically the same speeds as any other normal time and place, and there have been times where its been almost completely dead data-wise. Usually SMS will almost always eventually get through even on the most slammed networks, and the times where its been effectively dead has died down a good bit since the roll out of 5G. I'll often just switch to the venue's WiFi though, which often gives me pretty good speeds.
As others have mentioned, Mint (and many other MVNOs) has tethering included in all plans without any extras. It counts against your data allotment just like any other data, as it should be.
I haven't used a MVNO at a packed stadium, but I've never experienced complete bandwidth starvation even in large crowds.
I've also never had any problems with tethering on a MVNO; I think the restrictions are only for the "unlimited" plans which don't make a lot of sense (may as well get service from the major carrier at that point). In my experience, if you're paying for x GB per month, you are free to use that via tethering without extra interference from the carrier.
It all depends on how much they oversubscribe their frequency band.
As a Verizon, Tmobile, or Att customer you might be able to get 1gbps down .. but why do you need that on your phone?
Why are they popular? It makes little sense to pay $90 a month per line. With MVNOs the price is about 20-30$/mo. (Options out there: StraightTalk, USMobible, Lycia, Mint, Visble, Ting, Google FI, etc) Some of these carriers are even getting in international calling and roaming at an affordable price.
For MVNO on Verizon's network, any recommendations? I pay some absurd number for my Verizon plan in the Pacific Northwest because the mountains cause other providers (TMo, for example) to have no reception constantly. Verizon is basically the only choice. However i rarely use it, i spend 90% of the time on Wifi. I just want to be able to get texting/voice SMS/Phone/Data for emergencies (not just 911). So perhaps an MVNO is of interest to me?
Check if your phone has Band 71 support for good long range communication to the tower with T-Mobile. It's 600 MHz and has excellent penetration through trees. I got 7 mbps up and down through SIX MILES of 100 ft tall trees in Michigan at a cell aimed away from me using a high gain 600 MHz yagi on T-Mobile band 71. The other bands were uselessly attenuated (with smaller yagi antennas and diversity).
Verizon has historically had the edge because of 750 MHz (Band 13)
What do you mean by "high gain 600 MHz yagi"? you can't just attach an antenna to a cellphone, the phone doesn't have the connector for that, but also the FCC has Opinions about you doing that
Total Wireless used to be the easy answer here, but VZ just bought them (of course.) However, their plans (Total By Verizon, it's now called) are still pretty competitive: $30/m for 5GB data (2G speeds after that), unlimited T/T.
I've been a customer of theirs for years, and like you, I barely ever use more than 1/2 GB of data. I always preferred the VZ network in my area as well. Not sure if VZ carried over the tradition, but TotalWireless used to run nice Black Friday sales on low-midrange Android phones as well. I highly recommend one of the Motorola phones around the $200-$300 (less on sale) price point.
I’m not very familiar with the dominant internet providers out there, but Xfinity Mobile has been a great experience for me.
If you’re already am Xfinity Internet subscriber, it’s even cheaper, and the app makes switching between data plans dead simple and achievable within about a minute from the app.
I subscribe to the cheapest option, and if I ever need more data, I just bump up the plan for the rest of the month.
As far as I know, US Mobile is the only one other than Verizon-owned Visible that has some allocation of data at equivalent priority to Verizon postpaid customers.
Used to be with Visible up until a few months ago, but their issues with deprioritization started to make it almost unusable. I'd often look at my phone and have 3-4 bars, but nothing would load. Speed tests indicated data in the kilobytes range or just failed.
Switched to US Mobile (which as long as you have a 5G capable phone, puts you on their high-priority QoS tier) and haven't had an issue since.
What about voice quality or prompt delivery of SMS? Its anecdotal but i've had serious issues having delayed SMS on the T-Mobile MVNOs. Voice calls appear have been more spotty but thats harder to measure.
Magenta MAX is T-Mobile's unlimited data plan; $170/mo for 2 lines.
2 lines with unlimited data with Mint is ~$60/mo. You are paying $35/mo because you're only getting 5GB data. Check how much similar plans cost in India, Europe, Israel, UK (spoiler: they are drastically cheaper).
You are delusional if you think T-Mobile and the other big network providers offer good value for money.
Having recently switched to Mint after years of being swindled by T-Mobile, I'm really sad to see this news.
T-Mobile Connect is their existing $15/month prepaid plan comparable to Mint's. It doesn't require a bulk purchase, just keeping enough prepaid balance so that the monthly $15 fee can be deducted.
Last I checked, it had half the monthly data (2GB vs 4GB) and the same unlimited voice and texts policy. I don't follow along closely, so the limits may have changed again.
I wonder if they will reorganize any of that after acquiring Mint.
> You are delusional if you think T-Mobile and the other big network providers offer good value for money.
What part of
> I'm sure some MVNOs are a lot cheaper, and I'm all for it.
did you not understand?
BTW, T-Mobile's cheapest plan now has 10GB - which is more than probably 95% of users need? Paying $60/mo for that via Mint is just money thrown away for most people. To give you an example, I never exceeded 5 GB/mo, let alone 10GB, in over 10 years of using smartphones.
That $20/month 4GiB data (they have $15/mo as an intro rate) Mint mobile plan doesn't include any devices. Whereas $120/month to TMobile is $60 for their base Magenta service (which is still more than $15), but $30/month for an iPhone 14, and another $30/month for a series 7 iWatch (and plan for it). People want shiny new things and sign contracts to pay for them.
It's one of those things where if it works in your area, it works great. I've been on MVNOs for a decade now and the worst I've ever experienced was sometimes my data rate would drop to a couple mbps in crowded areas, but that's never been a material problem for me. I happily spend the $10-15/mo and get service that exceeds my needs. Sure it won't work for everyone in all cases, but you shouldn't discount MVNOs out of hand just because they are second class networks.
Stating you don't plan to increase prices means you are planning to increase prices, but you want to surprise people with it so they don't have time to find an alternative before their next renewal. You also get to control the PR narrative so the news of the price increase is separate from the news of the acquisition, and can lie to the government review board and say that the acquisition won't hurt customers.
> I've always found it strange that an MVNO is able to operate on the T-Mobile network the entire time and undercut their rates so much that they become a threat.
Think about it less as a network operating on T-Mobile's network and more of being a customer on T-Mobile's network. It's the same economics dictating wholesaling. The manufacturer or operator (in this case), can give a good deal to a customer with a lot of volume, does not have provide support, brick and mortar locations, or anything with customer server, just a high-level tech support for getting their systems integrated with the network.
You touched on a point that reminds of what Amazon does: let independent sellers create or list (and therefore assume all risk of) new products and copy them under the basics brand and undercut the original seller(s).
The Verge reported "The acquisition could let T-Mobile claw back the customers it lost when it sold Boost Mobile".
It is especially interesting that this acquisition is taking place at the same time Boost Mobile is experiencing a major technical problem. The problem has persisted for many weeks and has even forced them to shut down payment processing. During this period, their support team has been totally useless.
In other words, Boost has a lot of very unhappy customers looking to jump ship and you can be sure that T-Mobile is aware of the situation..
I've also been on Mint for about 4 years. Didn't realize this until a couple of days ago when I looked at my billing info.
It's been mostly good, but MVNOs do get throttled traffic in some situations. When I lived in the SF Bay Area, it was somewhat annoying to frequently get throttled on a crowded BART train or just while walking around downtown in the middle of the day. But for the most part, it worked fine, and I adjusted to make things work better for me (download offline music and podcasts for commutes, that sort of thing). It's a great option for people who are cheap and patient about internet data speeds.
Yeah I was going to say it works great until it doesn't which I find is a lot of time as in more than 2x per day. I get throttled and it is basically nonfunctional. That and dropped calls.
>And shaking my head at those who are paying double or triple that rate on T-Mobile, even though Mint uses the same exact network.
I tried every MVNO and find myself stuck on Verizon postpaid spending $90/mo because my phone actually works. If you live in a major city, throttling is the norm, not the exception, on these MVNOs.
I've used Mint a good bit in 5 of the top 15 cities in the US population-wise. Other than some events like sporting events or concerts its been acceptable for my needs. Honestly its the smaller towns way out there that usually means I get absolutely no service while a larger network like AT&T or Verizon would give acceptable performance.
And yeah, its "throttled". Doing a speed test right now on a Pixel 6a with good 5G signal I'm only getting 11Mbit down/21Mbit up while I'm sure the same phone on T-Mo proper would be getting >50Mbit, probably 100Mbit easy. But for my needs, that doesn't really matter. I'm not trying to stream a non-transcoded Blu-Ray rip from my NAS to my phone while I'm out and about and without WiFi. Usually if I'm without WiFi its because I'm out doing something, and I'm just wanting to look up something on an app like Google Maps or stream music or look up which aisle some product is supposed to be or get an email/IM or something along those lines. Which, 10Mbit is plenty for all of those needs.
Obviously everyone's usage is going to be different. Some people practically live their digital life entirely relying on their cellular connection and are rarely around WiFi, and its worth it for them to pay more for more performance. Different carriers have different amount of coverage and customers in different parts of even the same city. But for a lot of people like me, I'd practically get no difference in my normal experiences whether I paid $15 or $80 in my usage even if that meant my speeds on the go went from 10Mbit to 1000Mbit, except for my bank account being $780 lighter at the end of the year.
Purely for the anecdata, I'm also in this group. Had Tracfone's $40/mo plan for a few years and then a cc change caused a missed payment. Within 8 hours my service was discontinued, which was a huge headache trying to 2-factor my way into my tracfone account to update cc details. In the end I decided to move to a verizon plan for twice as much but now I have unlimited data and a company that _sounds_ like it won't throw you around at the smallest paperwork hiccup.
My nightmare story takes the cake. I tried to switch from Google Fi to "visible". I filled out the online signup, got mailed my sim card and when it came time to switch, their sign up website would just point me to a broken page. No problem right? I go to their support. It turns out the support is literally just a chat bot that you have to navigate correctly to finally get to a representative which is just a facebook messenger like window. (No phone support or address whatsoever).
In the end they couldn't figure out why my transfer failed and why I was stuck in limbo. They said they would escalate to their "Technician" who never got back to me.
Doing some research on Reddit I discovered that this is a common issue with that MVNO. So now here I was, never got onto visible while Google Fi is now informing me my service is about to be terminated because from their end I transfered out.
Keep in mind this whole saga took many hours to get to this point. I decided at that point to get away from this MVNO as fast as I could. I call up Google and they said they are missing the pin and some details to initiate transfer back to Google.
Visible says they dont have that data and to talk to google. I had no idea what to do and no one to ask for help so I decided to wait to see what would happen. Would I lose my number i've had for 15+ years? Turns out nope, Google Fi kept providing me service while keeping me in a perpetual state of "pending termination".
I just stuck with them for the time being because I didn't want to deal with anymore headaches. Eventually I tried to sign up for T-Mobile proper and they managed to get the phone transfered.
I've used multiple MVNOs (Ting, Tracfone,That Walmart MVNO,Mint,Xfinity mobile, visible and a few others). They all seem like they are gimped in some way whether it be delayed SMS, slow speeds, but now i've learned that another way they cut corners is with horrendous support and processes. As long as I can afford it, I will stay the hell away from these guys and I totally understand why so many others do as well.
Also anecdotally in this group - switched from AT&T yearly prepaid (25$/m or so) to post-paid Verizon because it got worse and worse over the three years I had it. Throttling got significantly worse over time and had a number of support issues with the yearly setup.
I have Mint and live in a major city and have never had any noticeable issues. If you're talking about power users, i.e. people using their phones constantly on network to do a wide range of network intensive things like watching videos, then sure it makes sense to not use a MVNO. If you're the average person that spends 90% of their time on wifi and uses their network data occasionally when not at the home or office then MVNOs are a godsend.
I was a Mint customer before I moved to T-Mobile. I had to move because Mint network got severely deprioritized and was unusable in public/crowded places. I still pay $15 to Tmobile but I don’t get deprioritized anymore.
Either that or they don't change the rate for Mint, at least for a while, and keep their own rates the same knowing that most T-Mobile customers either won't put in the effort to switch to Mint or be totally oblivious to the whole thing. And they now have greater control.
For T-Mobile, they win no matter what. They can afford $1.5 billion.
The unlimited plan on Mint is $30 a month not $15, which is similar as a bunch of other prepaid plans eg Visible (Verizon's prepaid brand) which is $25/mo.
I wouldn't say that it's really a threat. Part of what you're offering Mint is a guarantee that you aren't going to churn for an entire year each time you renew along with an up-front payment so they don't have to worry about chasing down payments. I'd also note that the $15 annual plan is a 4GB plan. Normally, Mint charges $25/mo for that 4GB plan if you buy in a 3-month increment.
It looks like Mint also doesn't include taxes and fees in their plans (See Taxes, Fees, and Surcharges https://www.mintmobile.com/plan-terms-and-conditions/). Taxes and fees can easily become a large portion of one's bill. It looks like that 12-month 4GB plan will have a $14 recovery fee ($1.17/mo) plus 2.5% ($0.38/mo). On top of that, there's the Federal Universal Service Fee (~10%, ~$1.50/mo) and whatever state/local taxes and fees exist in your area (which are probably 10-15%, but might be above 20% if you live in a high-wireless-tax state like Illinois). So that $15 4GB plan is likely around $20/mo (a third higher).
When you look at Mint's 12-month unlimited plan, it's $30/mo + taxes and fees - and it's not even unlimited! It's a 35GB plan! Plus, when you add in the taxes and fees, it's likely to cost over $38-40/mo.
Heck, on the 3-month 4GB plan, you'd be paying $25/mo + $1.50/mo in recovery fees + 2.5% ($0.63/mo) + USF and state/local taxes and fees bringing the plan to around $32-33/mo for a 4GB plan. A big portion of your savings is that you're willing to pre-pay for a year.
You can literally see that Mint values the 1-year advance payment as worth $10.58/mo to them (including the difference in recovery fees). So it's not just "Mint is $15 (really $20 with taxes/fees)." It's that pre-paid annual billing is probably worth $10-15/mo (given that I'm comparing a 3-month and 12-month plan and Mint's site doesn't seem to list 1-month plans).
> shaking my head at those who are paying double or triple that rate on T-Mobile
I think what a lot of people miss when thinking about plans is phone promos. If you don't want the latest phones, that's great and you shouldn't be on a plan offering phone promos.
For example, let's say you want a new iPhone every 2 years. T-Mobile will give you $800 in credits when you trade in your device. The trade-in is likely worth $300 making the credits worth $500. Each month you'd be getting $20.83 in credits. Let's say you're on a family plan with 4 lines and paying $42.50/line. When you subtract out the phone promo, you're down to $21.67 which is almost the same price as the Mint plan once you factor in the taxes and fees that you're paying on Mint. Plus you don't have to pre-pay a year in advance. Plus you're getting unlimited data, 40GB of hotspot, a $15 Netflix credit, 5GB of high-speed data when traveling internationally, and more. Divide that $15 Netflix credit and it becomes $3.75/line dropping the price to $17.91/line and you're getting unlimited data instead of 4GB and a cheaper price.
If you don't want fancy phones and don't want unlimited data, it might not be worth it to you. You can think of it as companies figuring out how to charge people the same money in different ways. Mint is giving you a very limited data bucket, adding taxes and fees onto the plan, and you have to buy your phone at full price. T-Mobile is offering phone promos and entertainment credits that can make the plan effectively cheaper than Mint while offering unlimited data and even international roaming.
> In terms of why T-Mobile is making this purchase, I'm pretty sure it's to take out someone who was eating their lunch.
It's highly unlikely that Mint was eating their lunch. It's more likely that T-Mobile wants a brand that can sell limited-data bundles to people like you who don't want to pay for an unlimited plan, pay for the overhead of stores, etc.
The problem with your argument is that you're comparing apples and oranges. First, you discount how much you're paying by going with the nominal charge and ignoring taxes and fees. Then you ignore the fact that you're getting 4GB of data rather than unlimited data. If I compare Mint's "unlimited" plan (which is actually only a 35GB plan), it's suddenly the same price as offerings you can get from T-Mobile (on a family plan) or its Metro sub-brand (as an individual). If you price in phone promos, entertainment, etc. T-Mobile's offerings can be a lot cheaper.
No, Mint isn't eating T-Mobile's lunch, but they have created a good following among people like yourself who aren't looking for an unlimited data bucket and want a low monthly fee and are willing to pay for a year in advance. If T-Mobile were concerned about Mint eating their lunch, they could just increase their MVNO fees. No, Mint has found a way to get people to pay for limited network access in advance which means a lot lower churn and a lot lower billing costs - Mint itself values annual billing at over $10/mo compared to quarterly billing!
Mint's rates aren't really lower than T-Mobile's. You're just interested in saving money on a limited-data bulk-purchase product that T-Mobile doesn't sell (and doesn't want to clutter their current brands with).
I bought the 10GB plan for 1yr up-front. List price was $240, was $267.25 after taxes and fees. So their $20/mo was actually $22.27.
> If you don't want fancy phones and don't want unlimited data, it might not be worth it to you.
People bothering to try and save $20-30/mo probably aren't the target market for upgrading a $1000 device every year or two.
Also, I don't like the financial shenanigans pushing me to upgrade when I might not otherwise care to.
> Let's say you're on a family plan with 4 lines and paying $42.50/line.
Lets say I'm not, because I'm not. A huge market full of people don't need 4 lines. So their cheapest plan would be $60/mo before taxes and fees. No Netflix credit. No upgrade credit. Tethering is only at 3G speeds without paying more. I'm not even sure what the taxes and fees are for this T-Mo plan, but even including it with Mint means the plan is $452.75 more per year than what I paid for Mint. Sure, I'd get unlimited data, but I don't even regularly use the 10GB I pay for on Mint.
I do agree the economics of these larger carrier post-paid plans start to make a lot more sense when you're buying in a big family plan group and they start throwing in a lot of other perks that you may want anyways. But if you're just wanting a single line and don't constantly buy new devices, the larger carrier post paid plans still often work out to be a lot more expensive unless you actually really use tons of data in a month, really want faster speeds all the time, or live in a place where these MVNOs are just truly unreliable.
Agree on all this. I recently switched three lines from Ting to Mint. On Ting the three lines were sharing 1GB of data without issue. Now we each have 4GB for only a couple of bucks extra per month total with taxes and such factored in and it just feels so extravagant. I also just got a new phone after over 5 years with my last one. I generally don't spend more than $200 on a new phone (Pixel 7 this time around) so I'm not in that demographic of looking for a new device every couple of years.
When I first came to this country as a broke grad student, paying 80$-100$ or joining a family plan with friends, sometimes even strangers, seemed absurd to me. Mint was the only thing I could afford at $15 a month. The data was limited, like 4 GB a month I guess, but I had Wi-Fi everywhere and only needed data for navigation.
Good for the founders, they championed MVNO space in some way. Perhaps bad for Mint customers - T-Mobile wouldn’t just purchase them for no reason.
T-Mobile is purchasing Mint to fix pricing obviously. I've been fixed at $75 for my fake "unlimited" plan now for about 10 years and switching plans will somehow only make things more expensive... Now ads and shoddy apps eat up my bandwidth at 5G speeds every month so I get throttled when I work hardest on my device.
Even though Mint wasn't useful to me, T-Mobile buying them means that monopolies are getting away with consuming the competition to create a price fixed environment. Congress is too tied up investing based on insider information to ever protect our interests as consumers, so I'll just look forward to the day where I no longer need a mobile phone perhaps. :/
Product differentiation for various markets and price discrimination are both common techniques that even a monopoly can use to extract more profit.
They know that not everyone would be able to afford the top tier of service. If Toyota were the only car company, they wouldn't only offer top end Lexus models. They would probably retain the various tiers, and simply try to capture the maximum consumer surplus at each tier.
There's no particular reason why a monopolist would want to remove a cheaper priced but lower functionality service, so long as it is profitable.
By integrating the businesses they might actually be able to find efficiencies and cost savings that make it even more profitable via economies of scale.
Whether those efficiencies end up as consumer savings is a question of how competitive the market is, but I don't see how this would necessarily harm the customer experience.
Might be able to reduce redundant storefronts, headcount, software as a service platforms, etc. Might be able to save money on employee benefits by leveraging larger group policies. They could do all of this while keeping things about the same or better for customers.
The only reason to actually eliminate the lower end of the pricing model is if it is unprofitable. Others would fill the space if they just killed it.
Why would a monopolist keep things the same or better? As you said, consumer surplus is the key here. The monopolist will capture almost all of the consumer surplus. This is a worse situation for customers than with competition. With competition this isn’t likely.
Mint Mobile is a service that offers cheap phone plans but doesn't have their own telecommunications stack.
It is just enabling a lower tier of customer to operate on the same stack as everyone else.
This is vertical integration, not horizontal integration.
The level of monopolization remains the same.
And even with a monopoly, some of the benefit of simple convenience could come into play when there is acquisitions.
Not having to go to a separate store and maintain separate accounts for different things.
Having a cable company that sucks and a phone company that sucks is not good. If they merged and the service remained the same then now you just have two bundled services that both suck.
Yet, having a bundled plan would potentially be more convenient.
T-Mobile offers streaming services, home internet, and other things that Mint doesn't.
Another problem with monopolies is that they atrophy so much that they can fail to even maximize their own profit.
And I didn't say you would get a great deal from a rational monopolist. I said that you would get tiered services that keep consumer surplus as low as possible.
Have you ever dealt with companies with near monopolies? Are you seriously with a straight face suggesting they tend to act this way?
They never do because the WHOLE point of becoming a monopoly or near monopoly is so that the customer no longer dictates the terms of their relationship with the company. The company does. It is about a power shift and simply put power being taken from the customer is never good for the customer.
Related if you can afford it, NextDNS[1] on my mobile device has been a godsend for blocking ads. Literally amazing how much speed it saves when sites aren't loading a bunch of ads / tracking libraries. I use it on my router and mobile devices and it's made a huge difference.
Re: competition being removed, that really sucks. I'm a Google Fi customer which has similar pricing, only downside is that if I switch to an iPhone, the service pretty much becomes useless as you lose access to WiFi calling and hotspots, things that work seamlessly on my Pixel :/
Edit: Apparently Google Fi now supports WiFi calling and mobile hotspots on iPhone as of iOS 13 Hmmmmm, maybe I can switch with no problems now.
I've also had success using dns.adguard.net as the private DNS on my phone. Doesn't cost anything but I believe the paid version of this and similar services allow for customization and statistics.
In applications/browsers without an adblocker, ads just show up as broken or don't bother loading. In Firefox/Mull/etc with uBlock Origin, it's redundant as those block and hide.
I used to use AdAway (maintains a system-wide blacklist added to your hosts file) but when I got my current phone I didn't bother unlocking superuser access and I believe the non-root version uses a VPN type solution. The custom DNS works almost as well.
Downside is that Adguard has a record of your DNS lookups, but normally your ISP or whoever has that so I consider it a wash. YMMV.
I use 1.1.1.1 for DNS on my iPhone just because of Cloudflare's speed in my desktop tests, DNS over HTTPS, and reliability. I do love AdGuard, and use the app on my iPhone. I've compared AdGuard MV3 vs uBlock Origin Lite MV3 in Edge, and since the beginning of it all till today, AdGuard is doing the better job.
The UBo team seems to want to find a way to punish users for MV3, removing features that AG MV3 has managed to implement, like adding custom filters. I don't need much of that, but I do need the ability.
The idea is to push uBlock fans (like myself) over to Firefox to use their full implementation. Not only is MV2's time limited in FF, but I used FF for 20 years straight. I'm not going back because there's enough web glitches with it that I don't want to anymore.
AdGuard seems to be doing a great job on mobile and desktop. Your comment just further backed up what I've been finding lately.
I do find the "unlimited" plan claims annoying. Most operators make this false claim. I know for sure that Tello does something similar, and their fallback is a "2G" (not actually 2G, just throttled) throttled speed to about 64kb/s. This is effectively unusable, and while they might claim it is just "slower", in application, many requests will just timeout and cause errors at those speeds.
I think Mint and Boost throttle down to around 512kb/s, although not sure as I've never experienced, tested, or read about it myself.
I used to love Mint, but since the population boom in Central Florida it is entirely unusable due to being a low priority network.
This means on many occasions you will have almost no bandwidth, I am talking cannot stream Spotify bad. The worst IMO is traffic jams, the one time I really want to listen to music and it will start cutting out.
If you're downtown there is a 80% chance you will not even be able to load a website or youtube, its basically unusable.
I know T-Mobile is working to up capacity, but I had to switch to Google Fi to get any real reliability.
Honestly, this kind of statement makes me more likely to consider them. I was on post-paid T-Mobile many years ago, but I left because it was entirely unusable outside of cities. Signal would cut out entirely 4-5 times on a 2 hour drive. If my destination was anywhere with more than about 500 feet between houses, I was probably impossible to contact until I left. This just tells me that the situation might have improved.
I'm pretty happy with my current mobile provider (a Verizon low-priority MVNO), but if that changed I might seriously think about something that runs on T-Mobile.
T-mobile coverage got considerably better in rural areas sometime around 4 years ago. I did a lot of long drives and would completely lose service for long stretches in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, much of Ohio.
Now I can't think of any time in recent years that I've gotten no service. The strength of coverage does occasionally drop if I'm way out in the boonies but it's so much better than it used to be.
> I'm pretty happy with my current mobile provider (a Verizon low-priority MVNO)
Mind sharing who it is? Especially if you like them. I've been a Mint user for years, but I'm not a fan of T-Mobile (the company) and during some recent travels I've noticed that Mint-to-Mint calls have gotten really bad.
Visible. It's actually a Verizon subsidiary, but you pay $25/mo for unlimited talk and data (though low priority data). There's a trivial hoop you need to jump through to get that rate (join a group of other people with whom you never need to actually interact; there are multiple googelable public groups).
That's entirely on T-Mobile for not providing capacity. Mint works fine in Manhattan. I could even get service from the basement of a masonry building.
This is why I switched to Verizon years ago--I had T-Mobile and one of ATT's grandfathered in unlimited data plans but you simply could not rely on them to deliver workable telephone calls and data access. As a consultant that was not workable. So even though it was WAY more expensive I made the switch.
They get breaches far more often than other carriers. The black market price of a SIM swap on TMobile is reputed to be significantly less than ATT or Verizon (see relevant Darknet Diaries episodes.)
For anyone who's looking for a sorta-alternative, I use Ting[0], and it's great. Great customer service. Good pricing. Decent reception, etc where I am. You definitely are second-tier vs someone who uses Verizon or T-Mobile directly, but it's great for my usecase.
Seems the good times on Mint will be over soon. It's really frustrating that in most markets these days the big guys constantly buy up smaller companies and kill them. Everywhere we end up with 2-5 super large players that have enormous market power and no real competition.
They already offer Metro (‘Metro by T-Mobile’), the more-T-Mobile-branded branded “Connect by T-Mobile” with similar pricing to Mint (which they seem to try to keep secret?!), and more expensive “T-Mobile Prepaid” plans.
I had their classic $30 prepaid plan at one time and you were treated as a second class citizen. My caller ID showed up as someone else's name and they refused to do anything about it. Sorry, you're on prepaid.
Dang it. I moved to Mint specifically to put some distance between me and T-Mobile. (Ja, I know, same network, but different account, easier to port my number out, etc.) Ugh.
As a Mint subscriber, the main thing that makes me sad is that I may end up having to shop around for (yet) another MVNO if T-Mobile ends up changing the terms/pricing.
Consumer Cellular is great, but still expensive by comparison.
Also, an older family member has modest needs and is budget conscious, so Mint has been great for their cell phone and even their rural internet. And boy they do not like change so if I have to change things again it'll be a pain in the butt.
Especially since this so very common in the sports world - Derek Jeter and the Marlins, George W. Bush and the Rangers (back in the day), etc.
But, professional sports teams print money. Most of the infrastructure is funded by tax payers. Salary caps (this includes baseball) keep expenditures down. Fans root for laundry, so rationality is out the window. Just look at baseball, you can pull down a healthy profit while having a dog-crap team (looking at you Pirates). As long as the team is a private entity, there is zero financial incentive to put a winning team on the field. Owning a sports team is a pretty sweet deal.
Sports teams' value is based on the brand. In terms of operations, they actually lose money for the most part, or it's not that profitable. I saw an interview with the Bucks owner Marc Lasry, who recently is selling his stake in the Bucks. The average NBA brand like the Bucks is worth around $3B right now. He bought his stake in 2011 for 150-300M.
I am highly skeptical of any claims made by owners/teams about their profitability. Here's a quote from a former MLB executive[1]:
"Anyone who quotes profits of a baseball club is missing the point. Under generally accepted accounting principles, I can turn a $4 million profit into a $2 million loss, and I can get every national accounting firm to agree with me."
There are all kinds of financial tricks one can play. I'm a baseball fan, so I'm going to lean on that sport, but I assume other sports do similar things. Let's say you are the Red Sox. Your parent company also owns 80% of the regional sports network (NESN) that broadcasts the bulk of your games. If you sell that TV contract to NESN for $1, then you just "lost" a hell of a lot of money. Except that money isn't lost at all. It just moves from the right pocket to the left pocket. Same thing with parking cars. Just start an external company to park the cars. Profits go to the company, not the team.
That's the real crux of the problem. Revenue not generated by the team isn't counted toward profitability. That's why most sports teams are advocating for mixed-use facilities. All of the profits from the surrounding businesses go to the owners, but are not reported on the teams financial books. This explains why the Red Sox and Cubs are investing so heavily in real estate around the stadiums instead of say locking up Betts, Bogaerts, and Devers to build a core around which to build. Or why the A's are balking at renovating their current location in Oakland instead of getting new land to build a mixed-use facility.
Then you see the expanded playoffs. Playoff games are sold as a separate TV deal, and all money (in baseball at least) is divided equally between the teams. It doesn't matter if your team is good or not, the owners share in bounty. The modern sports franchise sees profits independent of on-the-field performance. Separating revenue streams from the team itself means that you can paint a bleaker financial picture that isn't tied to reality.
A few teams (Packers and Braves) are public. Look at their financial accounts. Again, lots of legal (and commonly used) accounting practices will obfuscate the picture a bit, but these teams serve as a blue print for what is actually happening. The financial situation is never as bad as they say. Well, there have been a few exceptions like the Dodgers under McCourt or the Rangers at the end of the Hicks era.
I could keep going, but I'll end with this. Owners lie. The Cubs said they were facing biblical losses[2]. Yet, the same family was considering purchasing Chelasea FC. So much for being poor. More than just lying, the owners expect their colleagues to adhere to this lie. MLB owners are already angry with Cohen and the Mets [3] (I'd lump the Padres in here as well). Read the quotes from unnamed sources. The owners can afford to raise payrolls, but they don't want to. The party line is to cry poor. Owners who step out of line will face some sort of fallout from this.
I get your point about financial tricks. I've read the tax harvesting many owners use/do as well. Advertising and Real estate are also bonafide revenue streams, but arguably not good enough of a return by in itself. Also real estate, etc are huge projects, and not just bought for land to appreciate. A lot of it requires careful and strategic planning. It will not always work out.
But, it's missing my point that many owners are getting a 10x return on their investment when they flip the sports team mostly due to the brand going up in value, being a luxury item for the wealthy, or a status symbol, and hence growing 10x in Therefore, many new owners, and prospective ones at that as your example, the ones buying football or soccer teams...like the tech CEOs, hedge funds or Oil money, etc do so to either flip the trade to make 10x, or buy a brand to associate with for status.
Owners of teams like the As who do absolutely nothing to create a winning team get to live off the money made by other teams who are willing to spend on their teams and players.
The reported bids are north of $900M. He can't afford to be the majority owner. But he's said a few times he wants to be more than just a spokesperson and wants to have real skin in the game. This sale likely enables that
Does 20-25% really represent "being the face"? Did the company really give him that much equity to just be a face, or did he actually have to put up some capital?
I'd like to switch to Google Fi, but the lower prices on Mint have kept me there. If prices increase, I'll finally switch over. I've also been hoping that Google would sort out/consolidate Google Fi/Google Voice.
I actually created a separate Google account when I signed up for Fi expressly to keep them separate, since there was an awful lot of language in the Fi agreement that made it sound like Fi was the "Hotel California" of wave goodbye to your G-Voice number if you ever leave
Also, FWIW, I ejected from Fi over to Mint because the WiFi calling on Fi was indescribably bad as it "wo..cut...i..ou..can.you.hea...now?" and made me never want to call or be called more than I already was by default
Also, did no one from Mint's public relations department review the copy for this announcement before it went live? "Two excited guys, one video"? Seriously?
Mint's strategy is to write everything as if their audience is 10 years old. Every single piece of written material from them is soaked in this nauseating tone. Probably to distract you from the 7-8% "recovery fee" they add in right before you complete payment. They are/were just like any other MVNO, a deceptive fee-hungry machine focused on dazzling poor/undiscerning consumers with a cartoon lifestyle brand instead of actual value.
The company structure is quite unclear to me, but I remember the early days of 'Mint Sim', founded or cofounded by Rizwan Kassim.
That guy was on the subreddit basically acting as one man tech support, billing, and customer service. Always respected the heck out of that. Hope he made out like a bandit, his work ethic was off the charts.
If you're looking for an alternative T-Mobile MVNO Tello.com might be worth a look. I used to use it and it was _cheap_. I ended up moving to another MVNO on Verizon because T-Mobile coverage isn't great around my house but I was happy with the price and service.
Check if your phone supports band 71. If it doesn't your T-Mobile coverage will be way worse. Band 71 is the real reason T-Mobile coverage is good or great everywhere.
Been a Mint Mobile customer for about 2 years but recently made the switch to Verizon's Visible service for one simple reason, data connectivity on Mint Mobile was terrible, my best example of having zero access at Home Depot or Safeway, it became so bad I'd just do the searches for products at home and screenshot the results, my wife complains about the same problem but she's still on Mint Mobile. My two cents is for the cheapest $15/month package you get the bottom of the barrel data connectivity..but YMMV..
For this comparison to hold, Activision and Figma would need to be services built on top of Microsoft/Adobe. Mint has always existed at TMobiles pleasure.
I went with Mint and a 5g unlocked Motorola phone when T-Mobile stopped supporting the 3g phone I got from T-Mobile. I wonder how long it'll be before I'm forced to discard another otherwise fully functional phone?
I'm not a happy camper, but that's par for the course in this, the worst timeline.
Your 3G phone may not have been broken, but using it was like driving a tractor or horse-drawn buggy on a freeway. RF spectrum with propagation characteristics amenable to cellular networks is a precious finite resource, and older, slower radio protocols are downright wasteful to keep operating when LTE and 5G can accommodate more customers and more voice/data throughput with the same bandwidth.
Seriously, does Ryan need to do anymore Deadpool movies after this? That has to be chump change compared to what he is getting here (even with his 25% stake)
Considering most streaming/online services are out of reach for Indians, due to cost, and not for Americans, there is significantly lower impact on cell service. 4GB/$15 is isn't unreasonable for most people and can provide plenty of data for Spotify/Waze/browsing. Of course, that varies a lot when you start streaming movies over your dataplan. You'll hit 4GB in no time.
